Modern software development is evolving away from the client-server model toward network-based processing systems that provide access to data and services via the Internet or other networks. In contrast to traditional systems that host networked applications on dedicated server hardware, a “cloud” computing model allows applications to be provided over the network “as a service” supplied by an infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider typically abstracts the underlying hardware and other resources used to deliver a customer-developed application so that the customer no longer needs to operate and support dedicated server hardware. The cloud computing model can often provide substantial cost savings to the customer over the life of the application because the customer no longer needs to provide dedicated network infrastructure, electrical and temperature controls, physical security and other logistics in support of dedicated server hardware.
Multi-tenant cloud-based architectures have been developed to improve collaboration, integration, and community-based cooperation between customer tenants without sacrificing data security. Generally speaking, multi-tenancy refers to a system where a single hardware and software platform simultaneously supports multiple user groups (also referred to as “organizations” or “tenants”) from a common data storage element (also referred to as a “multi-tenant database”). The multi-tenant design provides a number of advantages over conventional server virtualization systems. First, the multi-tenant platform operator can often make improvements to the platform based upon collective information from the entire tenant community. Additionally, because all users in the multi-tenant environment execute applications within a common processing space, it is relatively easy to grant or deny access to specific sets of data for any user within the multi-tenant platform, thereby improving collaboration and integration between applications and the data managed by the various applications. The multi-tenant architecture therefore allows convenient and cost effective sharing of similar application features between multiple sets of users.
Cloud-based computing environments are experiencing an increasing demand for mobile applications; that is, many users of multi-tenant and/or on demand data services are mobile, and seek to interrogate databases which contain devices which are also mobile. An important component of mobile applications involves location awareness. In order to provide a truly mobile enterprise computing platform, on demand computing providers desire to implement geo-location support. It is further desirable to provide users the capability to search and filter for records by location.
In conventional approaches, spatial options allow users to deal with locations using specific types and indexes. Unfortunately, conventional spatial indexes are typically domain indexes and cannot be easily mixed with other data columns. Consequently, presently known approaches are not adaptable to the on demand environment since a column (e.g., organization_id) cannot be added for tenant specific data.
Systems and methods are thus needed for enabling on demand and multi-tenant computing environments to perform queries using spatial information.